FYI, here’s another piece of good news in terms of urbanism & transit, this time from us Texans: Fort Worth and Dallas have decided to team up and apply for federal jump-start funds for both cities’ modern streetcar systems together, to show a unified regional focus on transit. If approved, construction on Fort Worth’s streetcar would start no later than February 2012. A major shift for us, because we expect to still be in the *planning* stage by 2012.

“We launched our ‘American Revolution’ campaign in Times Square on Dec. 31, 2004, to signal that big changes were in the works at Chevrolet. Three years later, the ‘Revolution’ has taken hold.”

Unfortunately, less than three years after that statement, G.M. is in the midst its own reinvention, which has forced the company to shed expenses unrelated to its core businesses, sometimes at the cost of heritage.

The city of Vancouver has turned one lane of traffic on the busy Burrard Bridge into a bicycle route. Critics predicted chaos, but the first day of the experiment found traffic moving smoothly. This seems to be in line with recent studies suggesting that road closures actually lead to fewer traffic jams.

I’ve long argued that we need to look at peripheral arteries with 5-6 lanes that lead to narrower areas and other bottlenecks like merges where 6 lanes of highway feed into 2-3.

Everyone driving into the city usually enjoys a good ride until a certain point – that point is where the traffic occurs (whether a bridge, a merge, or entering Manhattan’s network of streets).

there are too many places where the periphery is over-laned feeding into less lanes that causes traffic to build up.

Take 2nd Avenue. It’s got 5-6 lanes coming down from Harlem all the way to the QBB, where it intersects with all those lanes…no wonder it’s congested below the QBB on 2nd. Same with the Midtown Tunnel and 3rd Avenue…

http://www.livablestreets.com/people/markwalker Mark Walker

From the Times: Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks. The lead discusses a young guy who drives while texting and kills someone. Later we discover he’s still licensed and out there driving. Now he’s a model citizen — or is he? “When he drives, he keeps his cellphone tucked in a space in the dashboard, and has set strict rules not to use it — rules he acknowledges he sometimes breaks.” Incredible. One in five text while driving and drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash. How many lives could be saved if their licenses were revoked? The carnage last year from cellphone use while driving totaled 2600 deaths.